Conservative radio host Steve Deace is banging the drums against the former Massachusetts governor. Again.

WEST DES MOINES -- To understand Steve Deace's feelings toward Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, one need listen no further than the one-minute canned introduction to the "Deace Show."

The song "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who plays and we hear an inspiring quote from President Ronald Reagan. The music shifts, then we hear the voice of President Obama, followed by remarks by Mitt Romney. Then Obama, then Romney. Then more Obama.

"We are no longer a Christian nation," Deace plays Obama saying, before switching to Romney talking about supporting gun laws, a woman's right to choose, and the Boy Scouts being open to people of all sexual orientations.

The implication is clear: Romney is no Reagan; he is an Obama-light. And the Mormon candidate may not even be a Christian.

The nightly barrage on Deace's show spells fresh trouble for Romney in Iowa, a state where he has never been strong -- or even fully committed to campaigning -- but still can't afford to come in at the back of the pack. Deace has been one of Iowa's most influential conservative radio hosts for several years, and this month his show went syndicated. It now airs in 21 markets, in Iowa and a handful of Southern states. During the fall, Deace was training his ire on Herman Cain. But when Cain dropped out of the race in early December, Deace turned his sights on Romney, reprising the air war he waged against the former Massachusetts governor in 2008 that one former aide says helped cost him the state.

I met with Deace at his home in West Des Moines in December, and he did not mince words when it came to Romney. "I would need to hear the audible voice of God telling me to vote for Mitt Romney," he said of what it would take for the episodic GOP front-runner to win his vote.

Deace said he'd be "fine" with any of three Republican candidates: Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, or Ron Paul. He said he was "intrigued" by Newt Gingrich and "interested in hearing more" from Rick Perry, as well. Last cycle, Deace backed Mike Huckabee, who went on to win the Iowa caucuses.

The enmity with Romney runs deep. Asked if Deace would vote for him if Romney gets past the Republican pack and heads into a match-up with President Obama, the answer was: Not likely. Deace repeated his line, word for word, that God would need to come talk to him to get him to cast a vote for Romney.

Deace talks about his Christianity a lot. He's also proudly anti-intellectual, a man who doesn't take himself too seriously. His website declares him a failure at college, a Star Wars and Star Trek fanatic, and a man who knows more about college football "than any man not living in a vow of perpetual virginity in his mom's basement should." (When we met, the Michigan native was wearing University of Michigan sweats or pajamas -- I couldn't tell which -- a Michigan hat and shirt, and was drinking coffee out of a Michigan mug.)

But don't be fooled by his everyman persona. Deace has a quick wit, the talent to verbally castrate an enemy, and an ability to drop plenty of somewhat obscure American historical references to back up his points. He quotes the bible regularly. He is absolutely certain that he holds the key to "the truth." And, perhaps most scary for would-be presidents, he knows a lot about what matters most to conservative voters in Iowa.

Deace's primary disdain for Romney, no major surprise, revolves around social issues. Deace recently devoted an entire hour, of his three-hour program, to lambasting Romney's record on same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.

Deace took up Santorum's argument that Romney refused to stand up to the Massachusetts courts, which legalized gay marriage when Romney was governor, calling it the "Pontius Pilate school of public policy." Deace mocked Romney, saying, "There's nothing I can do, the almighty, unelected judge hath spoken, and we must, like lemmings, follow said judge over a cliff."

(Romney argues that his legal counsel said he could not overturn the Supreme Court of Massachusetts' decision, and that he then led an effort to put in place a state constitutional amendment to define marriage as relationship between a man and a woman.)

In one example, Deace asked: When it came to amending the Massachusetts law to define marriage as between one man and one woman, did Romney:

a. When running for governor, denounce the marriage amendment as extreme?

b. When running for president, support the marriage amendment with great enthusiasm?

c. Both A and B.

And so the quiz progressed with callers repeatedly answering "c," and Deace feigning shock that Romney would change positions in the name of political opportunism.

But certainly there's more to a candidacy during these tough economic times than the same-sex marriage issue, right? What about the economy? What about Romney's business chops?

When we met, Deace said it didn't matter: "As Rudy Giuliani found out four years ago, if you're wrong on life, if you're wrong on marriage, people won't let you make the case how you turn the economy of New York City around. They don't care, because they view you as untrustworthy."

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”